#478: Online violence demo, pharmacy strike, rampaging high-schoolers
Funkturm turns 100
Dear 20 Percent,
“Why not German, too?” I’ve seen these stickers in a few places. This one was at a restaurant in Mitte. I guess it’s a reasonable question.
Germans have been complaining about the intrusion of English into advertising since forever. Sloppy slogans like “Come in and find out” (Douglas) and “Nice to sweet you” (Lindt) have been infecting public space for decades.
It’s not just ads, it’s the people working at Berlin businesses that irks some Germans.
CDU politician Jens Spahn sparked a little debate in 2017, when he was forced to order his dinner in English in a Berlin restaurant.
Personally, I feel you should make an effort to learn the local language if you stay somewhere for more than a few months. But tourists, digital nomads etc just aren’t going to. If you want to advertise lunch in Mitte, you’re going to say “lunch” and not necessarily “Mittagstisch”.
I suspect the real point of those stickers is to stir up a bit of Kulturkampf — culture war— to provoke a bit of indignation in “regular Germans”. I don’t think it’s going to work, at least not in Mitte.
More news below.
Maurice
PS: We celebrated our 30th podcast episode by going video. Now you can hear AND watch us, or just hear us. Either way we talk about the news. The latest is here.
Demo against online violence
Thousands of people gathered at Brandenburger Tor for a demonstration “against sexualised digital violence”. The protest comes after German actress and TV moderator Collien Fernandes last week revealed that she was filing criminal charges against her ex-husband, the actor Christian Ulmen in Spain (they lived in Mallorca). Charges include identify theft, insults, threats and physical abuse. She says Ulmen created fake accounts under her name, shared deep fake sexual images of her to his friends and even approached them sexually online while pretending to be his wife. The affair has prompted German justice minister Stefanie Hubig (SPD) to announce the government was working on new legal protections against digital violence. Men can apparently still get away with these disgusting crimes in Germany — Fernandes filed charges in Spain because it offers more comprehensive legal protections against online violence.
Striking pharmacists?
Three thousand Berlin pharmacists went on strike and held a demo at Potsdamer Platz on Monday. Really? These people are making okay money, often around €60,000 per year, a comfortable middle class salary in Germany. Nonetheless, pharmacy owners complain that it’s becoming tougher and tougher to operate a pharmacy profitably. Twenty percent of Berlin pharmacies closed over the past decade. Why? The fees they get per medication from the Krankenkassen hasn’t gone up in 13 years. Which I guess is why they’re flogging all those expensive skincare products on the side. Maybe it sounds heartless, but I’d be okay if they liberalised the pharmacy business and let drugstores like DM and Rossmann sell medication. Or at least allow the sale of painkillers at supermarkets or Spätis like in other countries.
Police raid leftwing spaces
Cops searched several radical leftwing spaces in Berlin and other Germans cities in connection with the two arson attacks that took out the power grid in the Adlershof technology park last September. One spot raided was the Kalabal!k anarchist library in Reichenberger Straße, Kreuzberg. Five hundred cops took part in raids of 17 properties. According to an online letter claiming responsibility, Adlershof was targeted to harm tech companies working in defence. It’s unclear whether the attack is linked to the sabotage of power infrastructure that caused the massive blackout in January. The September power cut is estimated to have caused €30-€70 million in damage to the 1,300 firms located at Adlershof.
High-schoolers attack police
On Friday, 350 fresh high school graduates were partying in the park next to the Planetarium in Prenzlauer Berg. It was getting a little out of control so the cops tried to break it up and then it got more out of control. The kids threw bottles and fireworks at the police. They eventually left the park totally trashed but by Monday some students had returned to the scene of the party to pick up garbage. A woman at the park interviewed by the Tagesspiegel used the lovely untranslatable word Wohlstandverwahrlosung to describe the incident, meaning something like “affluence vandalism”, hinting that that these Prenzl Berg kids were just a bunch of spoilt brats.
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Events this week, curated by The Next Day Berlin
🏳️🌈 Queere Kunst in der DDR?
Opening Thursday, 26.03, 6–9 pm at Mitte Museum, Pankstraße 47; Friday, 27.03, 6–9 pm at ngbk, Karl-Liebknecht-Straße 11/13. Exhibition through June 28.
Group show across two venues on queer art production in the GDR — a largely suppressed history now examined across both institutions simultaneously.
🎹 Gleo presents Elaine Howley
Friday, 27.03, 7 pm – 2 am. 90mil, Holzmarktstrasse 19-23, Friedrichshain. €15
Irish vocalist and producer Elaine Howley works with drum machines, synths, voice and tape — her debut solo record was named album of the year by The Thin Air. Berlin duo gleo open with live improvisation and field recordings.
🎭 Call me Paris by Yana Eva Thönnes
Fri-Sun 27-29.03, 8 pm. In DE and EN with DE and EN surtitles. Schaubühne, Kurfürstendamm 153, 10709 Berlin. €7-60.
A young woman discovers unsettling parallels between her own story and Paris Hilton's — consent, image rights and early internet misogyny examined through memory and media.
🪩 SESSION
Saturday, 28.03, 2 pm – 3 am. C115, Messedamm 23, Charlottenburg. €20
Twelve hours in the abandoned AVUS grandstand. Minimal and house on a hi-fi system calibrated to the brutalist concrete. Barbara Preisinger and Foehn & Jerome on the bill.
🍺 🥨 Germany-wide news 🥨 🍺
🗳️ CDU wins Rhineland-Palatinate election, but AfD surges
👨🏭 Germany recruiting more workers from India
🪖 Germany signs military cooperation deal with Japan
👮 Historian posts Hitler image as warning — and gets a visit from the police
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Factoid
The Funkturm, Berlin’s 150-metre radio tower, opened 100 years ago during the 3rd German Radio Exhibition (still going strong as IFA today). The world’s first TV images where transmitted from the tower in 1929. Albert Einstein held a speech at the foot of the tower in 1930 to open the 7th Radio Exhibition — the scientist features in the tower’s 2026 “What the Funk” marketing campaign. Radio was the internet of its time. The Nazis mastered its use for propaganda with its Volksempfänger, a cheap “people’s receiver” device that was in virtually every German home during the Third Reich.
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🎙️The 20% Berlin Podcast on Spotify
Those expensive skincare products you're referring to are in the right place, which is the Apotheke.
Most of those products are designed to solve dermatological problems. Dermatitis comes in many forms and each form has a particular solution (some want low PH, others high PH, some low fat thin cremes, others high fat balsams, etc.) And this is where the Apotheke comes in, because (ideally) the person behind the counter has the training to guide people to a solution they could use.
The Apotheke serve a useful middle ground before a dermatologist--these products are specialized and solving problems, but they don't require a prescription. But they're still a bit too niche for DM or Rossman.